Sirna Therapeutics Inc

Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. said Monday that it had agreed to pay an eye-popping $1.1 billion to buy Sirna Therapeutics Inc., a tiny biotechnology firm developing drugs based on new technology at the heart of last month's Nobel Prize for medicine award. Merck's $13-a-share offer for the San Francisco-based company is almost a 102% premium over Sirna's closing stock price of $6.45, down 5 cents during regular trading. The bid was made public after the markets closed.

Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. said Monday that it had agreed to pay an eye-popping $1.1 billion to buy Sirna Therapeutics Inc., a tiny biotechnology firm developing drugs based on new technology at the heart of last month's Nobel Prize for medicine award. Merck's $13-a-share offer for the San Francisco-based company is almost a 102% premium over Sirna's closing stock price of $6.45, down 5 cents during regular trading. The bid was made public after the markets closed.

Merck & Co.'s profit fell as generic competition eroded sales of its top-selling cholesterol pill Zocor, and Wyeth reported a fifth straight earnings increase on demand for new arthritis and pneumonia treatments. Merck, the third-largest U.S. drug maker, said Tuesday that net income dropped 58% in the fourth quarter, partly because of costs for acquiring a gene technology that won a Nobel Prize last year. Madison, N.J.

Switzerland-based Roche on Monday licensed rights to gene-silencing technology in a potential $1-billion deal -- the second recent move by a large drug maker to develop novel disease treatments based on Nobel Prize-winning research. Roche is licensing technology in the emerging field of RNA interference from Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., a small Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology firm, whose shares soared 52% in trading Monday. The announcement comes seven months after Merck & Co.